Robert L. Penick lives in Louisville, KY, with a free-range box turtle, Sheldon, and edits Ristau: A Journal of Being. In 2018, Robert won the Slipstream Press chapbook competition. More his my writing can be found at http://www.theartofmercy.net
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23 August
In that other life
That does not admit to knowing,
Speaking of, or hoping for sunlight
You grow tall as God
With your lack of being,
Ingress of dark,
Embarrassment of solitude.
Something grows here
Beneath the still, cloudless
Box, vines its way
Upward through your veins.
Soon it will wrap you up
Extinguish you just
Like the light.
\\
ISACOUSTIC* 